by Leonard Shecter

One recent day while Middleweight Rubin Carter was preparing for his fight with George
Benton, he stood in front of the gym at Eshan’s training camp in Summit, NJ, a .22 caliber rifle
resting easily on his arm, and searched for a target on the sunny hillside that rises behind the
camp.

“I burned me a squirrel yesterday,” he said, his eyes roaming restlessly over the green slope.
"He was leaping from tree to tree. Then bam! He didn’t leap no more. I been burning those
blackbirds, too. And bluejays. Bam! Those birds come over here and tell me, ‘Man, why don’t
you miss sometime.' I’m good.”

Carmen Tedeschi, Carter’s manager, stood at his side, also studying the hill. “There’s a
bird,” he said suddenly, pointing.

Carter raised the rifle and fired, the .22 making an oddly toylike sound, the ejected shell
tinkling like a Christmas bell off the hood of his black Cadillac parked near by. On the hill, some
200 feet away, there was a flicker of orange feathers. “Got him,” Carter said. “One shot.” The
feathers flickered again as though the bird were bathing in the dust. Carter shot seven more
times, rapidly emptying the clip. Finally the feathers were still.

“That was a robin,” Carter said to Tedeschi. “You shouldn’t have told me to do that. They’re too pretty. Now I’m gonna feel bad all day." He frowned, then added: “Till tomorrow — then I’ll get me another.” He smiled his even-toothed smile and went inside to put on his boxing gloves. On the wall of the barrackslike bedroom in which Carter slept at Eshan’s there hung three other weapons, a .32/40 Winchester, a .44 pistol and a 12 gauge shotgun. “I’ve always liked guns,” Carter said, “I got more home.” Guns have meant trouble for Carter. “I’ve done bad things,” he says, “I used to shoot people. I mean at them. Once they had to call out the riot squad.”

This was on the streets of Paterson, N.J., where Carter grew up to be a fighter. “I was
fighting one of those country fellas, you know, from the South,” Carter says. “I knocked him out.
His friends said, ‘O.K., we’ll be back.’ I knew they went for guns. I went home and got my
shotgun and came back. One of them had a shotgun, one of them had a pistol. I walked out in
the street, just like in the movies. I was fool enough so I didn’t believe I could die. That’s when
the riot squad came.”

Carter avoided arrest because the cops arrived in time, but he has not always been so fortunate. When he was 12 years old he stole six polo shirts. His father, meaning to throw a scare into him, called the police. As a result, young Carter spent the next five years in a reformatory. [Note: Carter did not go to juvenile detention for stealing shirts, he got probation. Evidently Carter did not want to discuss his assault conviction with this reporter.] Then it was the Army, then the reformatory again. If somewhere Carter bears, in tiny letters, a trademark as a fighter, it is 'made in New Jersey State Prison, Trenton, USA.' If Carter had not traveled this path, half his 26 years under the restraint of bars or command, it is certain he would not today be a man able to make his living with his fists, let alone the No. 1 challenger for Dick Tiger’s middleweight title. This may not be good, but it could have been worse.

“If I wouldn’t have been to prison I’d be a bum,” Carter says. “Maybe I’d be dead. I was a
treacherous young man. I didn’t care for life. I’d step toward trouble.”

This is the way of a number of today’s boxing champions. Sonny Liston came up this way,
via the Missouri State Penitentiary. The psychology is simple enough; frustration, the lot of most
Negro children, breeds hostility, which in turn broadens the area of frustration and in many cases
produces increasingly violent reactions to it. When hostility is successfully channeled into a
socially acceptable and yet violent activity like boxing, it has a soothing effect upon the
personality, in the opinion of Dr. Victor B. Elkin, a psychologist. “The tension isn’t being built up
as much,” Dr. Elkin says.

Not that anyone can predict what will happen once the ring career is over. If a man does not
understand the roots of his hostility, Dr. Elkin points out, he will not shed it easily. It makes one
wonder what is in store for a man like Carter. The immediate future is as shiny as a new dime. A
month ago, on nationwide TV, he easily beat Farid Salim, taking every round. In two weeks he
fights fourth-ranked Joey Archer.

When he fought George Benton, Carter was coming off a fight with José Gonzalez that he
had lost because of deep cuts above both eyes. “Butt,” Carter said bitterly and was not believed.
So he told Tedeschi: “No more fights with this kind of guy. If I get beat I don’t want to get beat
by a nobody.”

Tedeschi got him Benton, a man hardly anybody else would fight because of his reputation as a skillful boxer and hard puncher. Carter went in a 12-to-5 underdog, came out with a split decision and his challenger’s claim well established. The people around Carter say they were not surprised. “If you were going to order up a fighter,” says Tommy Parks, who is Carter’s trainer and the only college-graduate social worker with a second’s license, “Rubin would be it.” Carter has a compelling ring presence. Part of the reason for this is his general appearance: He is somewhat short for a middleweight, carrying his 155 pounds solidly on a 5-foot-8 frame. He is imposingly muscled. He shaves his bullet-shaped head but not his upper lip, and his mustache drips down the sides of his mouth, giving him the look of a Hun.

He cultivates a malevolent stare in the ring, what he calls a “Sonny Liston smile,” which not
only intimidates his opponents but stirs everybody in the arena into an expectation of immediate
mayhem. And there is also the knowledge that behind this warlike appearance is an electrifying
punching power. Carter may not be able to put an opponent away with a harsh glance, as Liston
seems to, but he can do it with one punch or a flurry, and nothing quite like it has been seen in his
weight class since Tony Zale. Counting his amateur fights, he has knocked out 47 opponents.
After only 14 professional fights Carter was in nationally televised main events in New
York’s Madison Square Garden, home of whatever glamour is left in this business. Since there is
a minimum $4,000 fee involved in such activity, the wise guys were saying nobody comes along
that fast unless the Garden has a piece of the action. It would take a Senate investigating
committee to dig the truth out of this charge. But astute Teddy Brenner, the Garden matchmaker,
says, “The Garden’s got a piece of nobody. Carter is an explosive puncher. He excites people.
You get a fighter like that, you want to move him.”

Just how exciting Carter was going to be even Brenner did not know until he matched him
with Florentino Fernandez, a Cuban puncher out of the well-connected Dundee family stable, last
Oct. 27. Carter, fighting his first main bout in the Garden, was considered then to be a one-hand
(left) puncher. So he put a glaze on Fernandez' eyes with a right hand and battered him senseless
with a left and another right. This took just 69 seconds.

Since then Carter has had five fights, losing only to Gonzalez and bringing his record as a
professional to 17-3. In beating Benton, he showed a versatility that many thought he did not
have. Benton, though the third-ranked middleweight, was getting his first big chance after 11
years in the ring. He had planned his fight around a counter to Carter’s left hook but, except at
rare moments, Carter refused to throw it. Carter obviously had absorbed some of the instruction
he received from the expensive retinue of fight brains Tedeschi had assembled. In this group were
Holly Mims, a wily old middleweight; Charley Goldman, an even older and wilier
ex-bantamweight; and Joe Washington, a young man who grew up with Benton and could ape his
style perfectly. The result was too much for Benton, who seemed paralyzed with anxiety and
could not adjust to Carter’s adjustment.

It is ironic that success should come to Carter that way. One thing he has shown through
his tumultuous young life is a severe lack of ability — or desire— to adjust. Carter has not faced
life, he has reacted to it, mostly with violence -- at least, paradoxically, until he became a fighter.
He was born in Clifton, N.J. on May 6, 1937. His earliest recollections are of Passaic, N.J.,
and when he was 7 his family moved again, to Paterson. He is next to the youngest in a family of
seven children. None of the others were ever in difficulty with the law. But Rubin Carter was a
stutterer. Rubin Carter was a delinquent. No one understands why.

“We were never poor,” says his father, Lloyd Carter, a reedy man in his 60s. “I always
supported my family. The kids never wanted for things. But Rubin got in with the wrong gang.
They looked to him as a leader. He was the bully. He wanted the name.”

“My trouble was the violent type,” Carter says. “I used to throw stones and break windows.
I’d fight with teachers. I had to go to disciplinary school — PS 22 in Riverside. I wasn’t dumb;
just hard to control.”

The incident of the polo shirts was just one in a long string of what might be called
rebellious pranks. What was Carter rebelling against? His father? School discipline? The color
of his skin? All of them, probably, and none that he knew of. But the arrival of the police his
father had summoned filled him with terror and hate.

“I believe that howsoever a man sows, that’s what he reaps,” said Lloyd Carter as he
recalled the event recently in the living room of his overfurnished home in Paterson. “When I
seen them sweaters I knew Rubin didn’t buy them. I don’t support a crook.”

Still, he obviously had not foreseen the consequences of ringing in the cops. “I thought they would just scare him up,” he said. “Rubin had done so many other things.”

Carter has never forgiven his father, although from time to time he moves back into the
house in Paterson. “There still is resentment,” he says. “And sometimes I don’t talk to him for a
long time. If my son had done that I would try to handle it myself. After all, all I did was bring
them home and try to give them to my brothers and sisters. They were so pretty. It wasn’t like
stealing. It was more or less of a game."

After that Carter had to play his games at Jamesburg reformatory. [In fact, he went to Jamesburg at age 14 for assault. In an interview in 1964, he boasted of stabbing a man. By the 1970's, he started descibing the incident as self-defence from a pedophile]. The zealousness with which he approached this occupation is attested by the fact that he spent five years at Jamesburg, and when he left no one else thought it was a very good idea. “I excaped,” he says, slipping into the street jargon he sometimes appears to have beaten through prison reading. “When I got to be 17 I started to realize women. When I first went there I didn’t care about women. What did I know? Then I started noticing dancing, clothes, just life. It got pretty dreary. So I excaped.” His parents, notified immediately, were expecting him when he got to Paterson. [note: In the Sixteenth Round, Carter's autobiography, he claims that when he escaped from Jamesburg, he was pursued and shot at. He escaped in a hail of bullets. No mention of that here, just that his parents were "notified" -- which is what you would expect.] When Rubin offered to enlist in the Army, his father relented somewhat and signed the necessary papers. Carter did not know it, but this was the start of a career in which he would get paid for something he had done free all his life- fight.

One evening in Bamberg, Germany, where Carter was stationed with the 11th Airborne
Division, he and an older buddy, a man who had done some amateur fighting, were drinking 3.2
beer. “You have to drink a lot of it to get the way we wanted to be,” Carter says. They drank a
lot of it. Bragging, Carter confided to his friend that he too, was a boxer. (He was a fighter, but
he had never put on gloves.) It happened that the reeling pair stumbled on a field house where the
division boxing team was training. “We seen the lieutenant and asked if we could try out,” Carter
says. “Probably we’da got beat to death. We wasn’t feeling no pain. But the lieutenant said to
come tomorrow.” [In later versions of this story, for example in his biography, Carter's companion is not a drinking buddy, but a Muslim, a Yoda-like figure who helps Carter find himself.]

Came the dawn and Carter turned a sober if somewhat bloodshot eye on the events of the
night before and sighed with relief. Fighting seemed like a terrible idea. The lieutenant, however
was not letting the lads off that easily. He intended to teach them a lesson. “I didn’t feel like
going, “Carter said. “But the lieutenant sent for us, and I had to. They put me in with a fella
named Nelson Glenn. He was a heavyweight.”

This really taught Carter a lesson. He knocked Glenn down in the first round and won himself a

spot on the boxing team, and at this point Carter started to like the Army. He fought 56
times, won 51, 36 by knockouts. He even gave up beer. But things were not going to be that
simple.

Soon after the end of his hitch, Carter got caught by what he considers a bookkeeping
accident. He was still down as an escapee from Jamesburg, and soon after he returned home a
conquering hero of sorts, a clerk somewhere in the depths of New Jersey red tape elected to make
a routine check. Carter was discovered at home by the visiting cop service and sent to
reformatory in Annandale, N.J. to serve out his indeterminate sentence. He was there for nine
angry months, his fuse sputtering all the while. “I thought the world owed me a living then for
real, ”Carter says. “I had a good job when they sent me to Annandale; I was a foreman in a
factory. When I came out I had nothing. I started hurting people in the street.”

On July 1, 1957, Carter and a buddy went on a two-man crime wave. The record reads:

Robbery Victim: Mary E. Deary

Robbery Victim: Ray Harrison

Assault with intent to rob Victim: Edward Simon

Yet at this late date Carter pleads innocent, sort of. “Look, I’ve done all kinds of things,”
he says. “I broke into parking meters, broke bus windows, anything. But I never robbed those
people.” [Oh yeah? Read the actual newspaper account of the crime.]

It was, Carter insists, merely booze and naked aggression. All they did was snatch a
woman’s purse (“It had no money in it,” he says), beat up a pedestrian, smack another in the jaw
and laugh all the way. “It was right on the street where I lived,” Carter says, unconscious of the
irony in his lyrical choice of words. “We were having fun. After I grabbed the lady’s pocketbook
she fell down. We were both laughing so much my friend ran into a wall. It was broad daylight.
If anybody was chasing us they coulda caught us easy. Then this fella came walking along, and
we beat him pretty good. We started running and ran into this other fella and we hit him, too. He
didn’t fall down. He leaned against a tree. We forgot about him, but he was following us.”

The wounded man pointed out his attackers to a policeman, who approached the pair from
behind, grabbed the friend with one hand and reached for his revolver with the other. Carter
seized the opportunity to escape. He could have been shot down, but there was no need to shoot.
The policeman recognized him easily. It did not occur to Carter to become a fugitive. “They
came at 2 o’clock in the morning to arrest me,” he said.

A sharp lawyer might have had the charges reduced to three counts of simple assault. But
Carter pleaded guilty to the more serious charges. “My father got a colored lawyer,” Carter says
with bitterness. “He was for real estate. He didn’t know anything about it.”

Not that Carter was helping himself much. The first thing he did in county jail was get into
a fight with a cellmate. “He got pretty well hurt,” Carter says, as though the man had been hit
accidentally by a car. “So no bail for me.”

The sentence was two to six years. Carter served four years and three months. Prison was
bearable because he stumbled into a training routine. Just because there was nothing else to do he
took to running around the hard-packed earth of the prison yard. It was an even furlong, eight
times around for a mile. He never ran fewer than 56 times around, or seven miles- often he did as
much as 11 miles a day, winter and summer. They let him watch fights on television, spar in the
gym, unload supplies to build up his muscles. Then there were books on boxing, and this led to
other books, and although Carter only has what he calls an 11th-grade education, he has an agile
mind stuffed with odd bits of knowledge. “But I don’t read fiction, ” he says. “I believe in
reality. What’s not there is nothing.”

So it was that when Carter dispatched Florentino Fernandez so quickly in his first main bout,
he was able to say: “It was easy. I trained for that fight for 4 ½ years.”

Altogether, his prison stay had what can only be called a beneficent effect upon Carter. He
entered a hostile, aimless, angry youth, emerged a young man with determination to become a
prizefighter, perhaps a champion. Considering what he had been before, this was a most laudable
ambition. And the presence of a worthwhile goal had a remarkably uplifting effect. Reflecting on
that subject recently, Marty Pettiford, a desultory light heavyweight and once Carter’s sidekick
(he spent 67 months in Jamesburg), remarked: “I can remember when Rubin would’ve hit you in
the head with a brick just for laughs, because there was nothing else to do. But not long ago I
seen him tell a kid, 'Don’t do that. You’ll hurt somebody.’ ”

Having your nose mashed regularly in a ring, apparently, is a gentling experience. Randy
Sandy, a journeyman boxer who spars with Carter from time to time, puts it this way: “The more
you know about fighting the less you realize you know. It makes you a nice fella. It’s the guy
who knows a little and thinks he know’s everything what’s dangerous."

Watching Carter “burn” a bird, it is not difficult to conjure up the man who was dangerous
to meet on the street. But despite the fierce look he cultivates so assiduously, there are glimpses
of gentleness. “He seems to enjoy things now,” his father says. “Before, he was always
wondering about his next move.”

“I got a goal,” Carter says. “I know what I got to do. I’m not a man to be messed with, but
I’m not a man to be feared. Now, for the first time in my life, I’m happy. I’m… I don’t know
how to say it. I’m interdependent. I need the milkman. But I don’t have to beg for anything.”
“Inside the ring,” says Manager Tedeschi, a man given to ornamental expression, “Rubin is a
leopard. Outside he’s a kitten with a heart of gold.”

Not exactly. As he says, Carter is not a man to be messed with, especially when he’s
drinking, a form of recreation he has not given up, despite the trouble he has seen. “I don’t
believe drinking is bad,” he says. “It’s all in the mind. If you can do it moderately it’s all right.”
Then he says defiantly, adding a little to the puzzle: “ I smoke too.”

Carmen Tedeschi came on the scene when Carter decided to quit his first manager, a man
who was, by profession, a prison guard. “He was money-hungry, “Carter says. “To him $100
was like $1 million to anybody else. I remember I’d ask him, 'Buck,'- that was his nickname -
'Buck, let me have $2 or $3.’ I starved. I mean I starved. I didn’t have anything to eat for two or
three days. And he’d say he didn’t have the money.”

Carter blames his first losses as a pro, both of which were reversed, on his former manager
who, he says, forced him to drink a dehydrating concoction. He was ready for a change when his
uncle, who worked for Tedeschi, introduced them. “I used to kid his uncle," Tedeschi recalls.
“I’d ask him ‘When you going to bring me a champion?’ I’ve always had champion pigeons.
(Tedeschi has an elaborate coop in the backyard of his middle-class split-level in Saddle
Brook, N.J. stocked with some 100 sleek, chesty birds he says are worth $100 each.) And I
always wanted a champion fighter. Well, one day he brings Rubin around and says, ‘Here’s your
champion.’”

The first thing that impressed Carter was Tedeschi’s vast lack of knowledge about the
boxing business. In the end, though, Tedeschi charmed him by being honest -- even generous --
financially. Also he got him fights. Tedeschi, rated a substantial citizen in the north Jersey area,
knows a lot of people and sold a lot of tickets to Carter’s fights. “I used to eat $250, $300 worth
of tickets for every fight,” Tedeschi says. “What did I care? I could tell Rubin was going to be a
champion.” (One of the ways he could tell is that his wife, Nicoletta, is an amateur astrologer. “I
believe in the stars,” Tedeschi says. “I’m also very superstitious.”)

Like Carter, Carmen Tedeschi (pronounced Tedeski) is a puzzling figure. He is a short,
fleshy man with slicked-back jet hair bearing the signs of new gray and, although he never has
been a fighter, a light, hoarse voice of the kind Anthony Quinn affected in Requiem for a
Heavyweight. His manner is so sincere it is dangerously close to oily. Yet there is no reason to
suppose he is not what he says he is -- a wealthy contractor, a fancier of racing pigeons, a man
dedicated to building a champion in a business he knows almost nothing about. “I’m not looking
for money,” he said not long ago, as he tooled along behind the wheel of one of a succession of
Cadillac convertibles he was delivering to camp for Carter’s inspection. “I’m looking for honor.
The only thing I ever took from Rubin was expenses. I think God is on my side. I’m gonna have
a champion, and he’s not gonna be broke.”

Tedeschi considers his relationship with Madison Square Garden a natural. He has what he
calls the “produck” and the Garden has the building. “It’s legit all the way, “ he said. “They
don’t even want a piece of my fighter.”

It was something of an accident, but Tedeschi does seem to have come up with a winner.
Carter is certainly no ordinary fighter. His dedication to training, for example, borders on the
fanatical. “This cat beats the alarm clock up to run,” Pettiford said Ehsan’s recently, wincing as
he watched Trainer Parks slam Carter in the belly with a medicine ball. “It’s seven miles around
this mountain, and then he sprints two miles. The cat just likes to run, and the worse the hill the
better he likes it.”

The medicine ball workout is reminiscent of Sonny Liston’s avidity for this form of
masochism, except that Liston takes in a less rugged fashion than Carter. Liston stands erect and
backs up perceptibly as the heavy ball, heaved by his trainer, hits him. Carter lies flat on his back
on a mat. There is no place to back up to. All that is between the ball and floor is Carter, muscle,
guts and spine. As Parks slams the ball against him Carter grunts, “Harder, harder.”

Carter pretends he doesn’t like to train. He would rather do the twist, he says, and all its
sophisticated variations, including mashed potatoes and the waddle, or just listen to rock ‘n’ roll.
“No sir,” he said the other day as he quit a 12-minute, nonstop session with the jumping rope,
oozing sweat but refusing to breathe heavily, which is one of his vanities. “I don’t like being in
camp. It’s lonely. I been confined by myself too much. I’d like to be out on the street. I mean
with the people. I just want to come out of these hills and get the job done as quick as possible.”
Sometimes, he says, the grind gets him so far down he dreams of being free of it altogether. “As
much as boxing has done for me,” he says, “I wouldn’t fret one minute to get a job, go to work
every morning and get paid every week. It’s less money; but you could learn to live within your
means.”

Probably he didn’t mean a word of it. He is full of such small contradictions. While he
snickers at his father’s devotion to Sundays (“He wouldn’t even let me go to the movies,”) he
professes a belief in God. “There are too many flaws and loopholes,” he says, “I can’t advance
something I don’t know myself. I want to believe, but before I believe I got to know. I don’t
believe in spookyism. But I believe there’s a God. I won’t be dogmatic and say there is. I
believe, though. Man couldn’t do it, that’s for sure. Man’s so greedy if he put the sun up there
he’d be charging $25 a day.”

Although a lot of people have been nice to him in recent years, Carter sneers at the motives
that he thinks move men. “Most people are brutal, barbaric, “ he said as he lay back hands behind
his head, on the iron bed and khaki blanket in his bedroom at Ehshan’s. “People want to see
people get knocked down. If people go to fights they don’t want to see a kindly game of croquet.
They want bodily contact.” He sat up abruptly and made punching motions. “Bam! Bam! Like
in football. People want a show. Maybe they don’t come to see blood, but if they see it they feel
good.”

This kind of cynicism veins his conversation. Once he was asked if he did not feel he was
running interference for Liston, getting a license to fight in New York despite his prison record,
although Liston could not. “I like Liston,” he said. “But I got to say this. If he don’t have a
license it’s no concern of mine,” and while he has been interested in the events in Birmingham it
has not occurred to him make a pilgrimage there, as Patterson and Jackie Robinson did. “You
know what I would do?” he said. “I’d like to get me a cannon and blow up Alabama.” [note: "Events in Birmingham" refers to the civil rights uprising over desegregation of the schools -- fire hoses, police dogs, the infamous sheriff Bull Connor. In September of 1963, one month after the March on Washington, four young girls were killed when white supremacist terrorists planted a bomb a church basement.]

What he wants out of boxing, he says, is money. “I also want a family,” he says earnestly,
without a trace of stammer, most of which he lost in speech therapy school in Germany. (He
expects to lose the rest of it when he becomes champion.) “I want to give people everything I
never had. I mean consideration, protection.”

What Carter wants, actually is to be a character. He affects a bop-type beard he must shave
off before each fight and he has a far-out taste in clothes running to vividly colored berets and
suits with velvet collars. He had just become engaged, for example, when a reporter asked him the name of his fiancee. “I don’t know,” he said. “I just call her T or Miss T.” (Her name is Thalma Boskett and he knew it, of course. They were married last summer.)

Carter understands intuitively that it is the offbeat that draws attention. That is why he does
not like the “Hurricane” tag stuck on him by a Garden publicity man. “It’s not unusual
enough,” he said. “You got to be unusual.” What you also got to do is win fights.

“In my mind I’m the champion,” Carter said after his knockout of Fernandez. “I know
nobody can beat me.”

Even Dick Tiger?

“He’s a very good fighter,” Carter said several months ago. “We’ve talked. He’s very
friendly. He’s kind, he’s a gentleman, he’s a prizefighter and a man. And that’s the man I’m
going to beat.”

Now he puts it somewhat differently, perhaps influenced by the loss to Gonzalez. “I guarantee
you one thing,” he says, “one of us is going to sleep.” END

[ For more on Carter's boxing career, click here ]